For years, technology and big data collection have enabled marketers to focus on customer behaviors. When we know exactly where customers navigate, what they open and what they click in a digital marketplace, those become the default metrics to chase. But are they the best ones?
In a landscape where access to user data is everchanging, marketing metrics are becoming more challenging to measure all the time, which will inevitably leave us with a knowledge gap. This presents organizations with a unique opportunity to look beyond the simple ‘what’ customers are doing, to truly understand ‘why’ customers do what they do and furthermore, get strategic about why specific marketing tactics drive certain behaviors.
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The Rise of the Chief Customer Officer (CCO)
In recent years, customers’ needs and expectations have risen significantly, paving a new path for the rise of the CCO role. CCOs are champions of what success looks like and means through the lens of the customer and, as such, have the power to pivot tactics and metrics to rally around that cause. With respect to metrics, while traditional marketing data will always hold value, it generally paints a very narrow view of the full picture. It is essential for brands to look beyond the numbers to ask the right questions and actively listen to develop a strong qualitative insight surrounding what customers really care about and how that translates to business KPIs. In fact, many of the world’s largest brands, including McDonald’s and Hostess, to name a few, have added the CCO title to their leadership ladder.
How the CCO Puts Customer Centricity Into Practice
Many companies understand customers are a key component of growth and stability. The challenge lies with how to put into action a plan to understand and deliver on customer goals. That is where the CCO role takes hold. A CCO’s core obligation is to prepare, educate and streamline organizations toward best practices in establishing customer-centricity.
Some organizations take Outback Steakhouse’s recent decision to assign responsibility for customer strategy to their CMO, for example. It will disperse the responsibility for customer outcomes to the team at large. While teamwork is nice in theory, the bystander effect takes hold, and customer experience becomes a priority for none. Establishing best-in-class customer-centricity requires dedicated leadership to advocate for the customer.
Defining the CCO’s Role
It is up to the chief customer officer to lead the charge on customer experience, which involves four immediate priorities:
1. Enabling KPIs through CPIs:
Customer performance indicators (CPIs) are new metrics that track the goals that customers desire to achieve when they do business with a brand. For example, a goal such as “saves me time” would be something that universally can be achieved across most industries, from retail coffee chains to insurance companies, to the shared economy and ecommerce venues. Not to mention, they focus on if and how brands can help customers better achieve their more human-centered goals as they interact with and use a brand’s product or service.
2. Navigating cultural shifts:
Setting a CCO up for success in a company’s leadership team requires careful navigation of existing relationships and organizational structures. The CCO will connect cross-functional teams, empower frontline employees to interact with customers, and translate the vision of leadership to all, harmonizing decision-making with customers at the heart of it.
3. Balancing the internal and external:
Customer-centric initiatives can often stall out because of organizational barriers. The CCO takes stock of internal employee engagement to determine gaps in the employee experience that may affect the ultimate customer experience. At the end of the day, investing in internal systems, like employee engagement, is a clear indicator of success with external customers.
4. Prioritizing long-term growth:
Accurately assessing gains requires both the articulation of the long-term plan and the implementation of short-term metrics to demonstrate wins along the way. An effective CCO is a champion in the face of skepticism, doubt, and short-term thinking from stakeholders. This can take shape in the form of utilizing a robust set of customer performance indicators to gauge company performance with respect to meeting customers’ goals and educating employees to align with and act on that customer-centric vision.
The Characteristics of a Successful CCO
CCOs are research-driven conductors of a brand’s customer-centricity orchestra. They must establish a vision for the music, write the composition, set the tempo, and hold the team members accountable for their part in the production of the customer strategy.
While intuitive team members like frontline employees and the CMO do play an important role, establishing harmony within a business’s customer-centricity ecosystem goes far beyond the obvious team members and into other less obvious functional areas like finance, human resources, and product development, to name a few. CCOs are builders who can empower and activate an organization’s employee base around the common goal of cultivating reciprocal, mutually valuable relationships between customers and the organization. Effective CCOs are educators and connectors, giving brands and employees alike a feeling of higher purpose.
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The Takeaway
Though the chief marketing officer will never be obsolete, the chief customer officer will only rise in importance as customer experience continues to shape the market. In our changing data environment, the more we are able to connect with customers on a human level, the more likely we are to establish the critical basis of trust to move toward zero-party data.
Truly understanding customers’ goals and motivations is the only way to answer these questions and create value for both organizations and customers alike. As the master of such an effort, the CCO plays a critical role at the executive table.
Does your company have a CCO? How have they benefited your organization? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.